A free and open web is a vital resource for people and businesses around the world. And ads play a key role in ensuring you have access to accurate, quality information online. But bad ads can ruin the online experience for everyone. They promote illegal products and unrealistic offers. They can trick people into sharing personal information and infect devices with harmful software. Ultimately, bad ads pose a threat to users, Google’s partners, and the sustainability of the open web itself.

We have a strict set of policies that govern the types of ads we do and don’t allow on Google in order to protect people from misleading, inappropriate, or harmful ads. And we have a team of engineers, policy experts, product managers and others who are waging a daily fight against bad actors. Over the years, this commitment has made the web a better place for you—and a worse place for those who seek to abuse advertising systems for their own gain.

In 2016, we took down 1.7 billion ads that violated our advertising policies, more than double the amount of bad ads we took down in 2015. If you spent one second taking down each of those bad ads, it’d take you more than 50 years to finish. But our technology is built to work much faster.

Last year, we did two key things to take down more bad ads. First, we expanded our policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers. For example, in July we introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users. In the six months since launching this policy, we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads. Second, we beefed up our technology so we can spot and disable bad ads even faster. For example, “trick to click" ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realizing they are often downloading harmful software or malware. In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.

Here are a few more examples of bad ads we took action against in 2016:

Ads for illegal products

Some of the most common bad ads we find online are ads promoting illegal activities or products. Although we've long had a policy against bad ads for pharmaceuticals, last year our systems detected an increase online. We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.

Similarly, we saw more attempts to advertise gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate. We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

17M ads removed for illegal gambling violations

Misleading ads

We don't want you to feel misled by ads that we deliver, so we require our advertisers to provide upfront information for people make informed decisions. Some ads try to drive clicks and views by intentionally misleading people with false information like asking, “Are you at risk for this rare, skin-eating disease?” or offering miracle cures like a pill that will help you lose 50 pounds in three days without lifting a finger. In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

1,300+ accounts suspended for tabloid cloaking

Bad ads on mobile

If you’ve ever been on your phone and suddenly, without warning, ended up in the app store downloading an app you’ve never heard of, a “self-clicking ad” could be to blame. In 2015, we disabled only a few thousand of these bad ads, but in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.

Ads trying to game the system

Bad actors know that ads for certain products—like weight-loss supplements or payday loans—aren’t allowed by Google's policies, so they try to trick our systems into letting them through. Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

To fight cloakers, we take down the scammers themselves, and prevent them from advertising with us again. In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking. Unfortunately, this type of bad ad is gaining in popularity because people are clicking on them. And a handful of scammers can pump out a lot of bad ads: During a single sweep for tabloid cloaking in December 2016, we took down 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads seen more than 20 million times by people online in a single week.

Promoting and profiting from bad sites

When we find ads that violate our policies, we block the ad or the advertiser, depending on the violation. But sometimes we also need to suspend the website promoted in the ad (the site people see after they click on it). So, for example, while we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads last year, we also took action on 8,000 sites promoting payday loans.

Here are some examples of common policy violations we saw among bad sites in 2016:

We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.

We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.

And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

Publishers and website owners use our AdSense platform to make money by running ads on their sites and content, so we have strict policies in place to keep Google's content and search networks safe and clean for our advertisers, users and publishers. When a publisher violates our policies, we may stop showing ads on their site, or even terminate their account.

We've had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content. From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations. We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.

Just a few weeks ago, Canadians flocked to YouTube to watch as a holiday artichoke dip recipe went terribly wrong. If you’re like me, you just had to share this hilarious video with family and friends. And in Canada, this was a clunky process - you had to copy and paste a link into an email or messaging app to share the moment.

That’s about to change. As of today, we’re making it a whole lot easier for Canadians to share their favourite YouTube videos with friends and family.

A few months ago, we began experimenting with better ways to share on YouTube, starting with a small group of users. And now Canada is the first country to roll out this new YouTube sharing feature. Why Canada? Well, it turns out that Canadians are world leaders when it comes to sharing. On our mobile devices, Canadians share videos 15% more often than other global users.

Starting today, when opening the YouTube mobile app, signed-in users with a channel will see a brand new Shared tab. Tap the tab and you’ll be able to add your friends and family as contacts, so you can share with them. Not only can you share and receive videos in the app, you can also chat about them right on YouTube, reply with another video, invite others to the conversation, and more. We think it’ll make sharing easier, faster and more fun on your phone. And of course, if you want to continue sharing videos through other apps, you can still do that too.

New sharing feature on your YouTube mobile app

Shared videos all live in your Shared tab, making it easier than ever to catch up on videos your friends have shared or to show them a few of your own favourites. The new feature will be available in both Android and iOS.

New Shared tab on your YouTube mobile app

And there’s more great news - this feature will start rolling out today to all YouTube app users in Canada, but as you share videos with your friends and family around the world, they’ll also get to use the new Shared tab themselves.

Start a group, share your favourite new music video with a friend or make sure your mom knows to never substitute sliced oranges in her artichoke dip. Show someone you care today and share!
Posted by Nicole Bell, YouTube Canada

Led by two homegrown acts in the Top 3 and an unsigned group of indie-rockers from Alberta, Google Play’s list of up-and-comers gives Canadians a few more reasons to celebrate this year.
Here are Google Play Music Canada’s top 10 ‘Artists to Watch’ in 2017:

When selecting the list, our Google Play Music editorial team considered everything from track performance on Google Play Music and social media analysis to Google search metrics and, simply, their pure, inalienable gut instinct.
Nabbing the top spot is New York-born pop diva Bebe Rexha, who’s stepping into the spotlight solo after a decade of penning chart-topping hits for everyone from Selena Gomez to Eminem.

Canadian-based acts James Barker Band and Allan Rayman came in at #2 and #3, respectively -- the former having scored the fastest-climbing Country single on Canadian radio in 2016 with “Lawn Chair Crazy,” and the latter, a smoky-voiced soul singer with an indie/alt edge and undeniably intriguing err of mystery.

The other up-and-comers span genres, nationalities and varying levels of success. There’s 12-year-old ukulele darling Grace VanderWaal (hailed by Simon Cowell as “the next Taylor Swift”), the British hip hop bluesman Rag ‘N’ Bone Man (winner of the 2017 Brits Critic’s Choice award, ranking him among the likes of Adele, Sam Smith and Florence & the Machine), and Fast Romantics, the as-of-yet (but not for long) unsigned indie rockers from Alberta.

Today’s digital devices and tools offer amazing opportunities for kids to imagine, invent and explore with technology—and perhaps most important of all, have fun! Over the years, we’ve worked closely with educators to build programs for kids to create through code, doodle their dreams, explore exotic locales with virtual reality, and even tour the Himalayas with a very friendly Yeti named Verne. Today, we’re unveiling our latest project for kids—one that will give voice to their imaginations and transform their devices into playful and powerful tools for learning creative skills. It’s called Toontastic 3D.

With Toontastic 3D, kids can draw, animate and narrate their own adventures, news stories, school reports, and anything else they might dream up. All they need to do is move characters around on the screen and tell their story. It’s like a digital puppet theatre… but with enormous interactive 3D worlds, dozens of customizable characters, 3D drawing tools, and an idea lab with sample stories to inspire new creations.

Like the original Toontastic (released in 2011 and widely praised by educators, kids, and parents around the globe), Toontastic 3D enables kids to build whatever they like—including book or science reports for school, design pitches, short stories and cartoons.
Toontastic 3D is available and free to download today for phones, tablets and select Chromebooks, on both the Google Play Store and iOS App Store. We hope the app will empower kids to imagine, invent and explore while developing skills for the creative jobs of tomorrow—whether they dream of becoming a filmmaker, a teacher, a designer, a cartoonist, or just want to explore the boundaries of their imaginations.